Is Our Weather Getting Worse…?

I should be pleased in that it basically makes the same points I made in my last post. The recent weather we’ve been getting is exactly what we’d expect in a warming world: more heat leads to more moisture in the atmosphere, more heatwaves, more rain, more floods, and more unstable weather generally.

Only it’s a Channel 4 documentary, like The Great Global Warming Swindle, so I was predisposed to hostile suspicion from the start.
In a sixty minute program we had to endure 45 minutes of extreme weather porn that got nowhere near to answering the question posed in the title. Fun to watch, but it meant the interesting stuff was telescoped into the final 15 minutes. As to the question I considered in my last post- “does the historical record show a trend towards more extreme weather, or not?”- the answer seemed to be ‘yes’. Various meteorologists were interviewed and that was the impression given. But it being a Channel 4 documentary and all, I didn’t feel entirely confident with this conclusion, particularly given the whiny and equivocal language used in the program’s closing statements:

“Some experts…”

“Recent weather seems to agree…”

“If many of the worlds experts are right…”

And it tied itself up in knots trying to force the recent cold winters into the narrative, ending up with an unsatisfactory run-through of the old “global warming will change gulf stream and plunge British Isles back into ice age” chestnut. The trouble is, as Dr Boxall explained, it might not.

Still, at least it did raise the question that I complained hadn’t been raised in recent UK flood coverage, so it seems churlish to criticise too much. Perhaps I’d better stop now.